Security as a dimension of quality of service in active service environments

Presents our approach to handling security as a QoS dimension and discusses how variability in network security services and their associated costs can be managed in a middleware environment. We present our "quality of security service" (QoSS) concepts in terms of various security mechanisms and dynamic security policies. We also briefly describe our QoSS costing framework and demonstration, which illustrate how costs associated with network security services can be calculated and supplied to a middleware resource management system (RMS). Finally, we discuss our experiments on linking QoSS conditions to an underlying security mechanism, such as IPsec. Our aim is to demonstrate an approach through which security can be treated as a QoS dimension. We have illustrated that a security mechanism like IPsec can be modulated to provide levels of security that are in harmony with QoSS requests.